University Archives

Zoonotic diseases are diseases that are transmitted between animals and humans. Zoonoses affect people in rural and urban environments due to the frequent interaction between animal species and humans in similar environments. Urban agriculture incorporates livestock like chickens, cows, pigs, and goats, all of which can spread diseases to farmers. These farmers can then spread these diseases to the human population. The information on zoonoses related to urban agriculture is very minimal in peer-reviewed scientific literature. To help find articles related to zoonoses and urban agriculture, key search terms were used on the database PubMed. The three key search terms were Urban Farming/Zoonoses, Urban/Zoonoses, and Urban Agriculture/Zoonoses. Each of these key terms provided a set of articles that represented different ways of reporting zoonoses in the urban environment. The goal of this study was to see how different search terms affected searches on the topic. Some of the articles found were found in more than one search term, but the majority of the articles were unique and found once through each key term. This suggests that using different key search terms is beneficial in a systematic review in order to find relevant studies on the topic.